


Talking To The Lights

by gnomesb4trolls



Category: Stranger Things (TV 2016)
Genre: Angst and Hurt/Comfort, Eleven | Jane Hopper Needs A Hug, Family Feels, Gen, Grief/Mourning, Implied/Referenced Character Death, Siblings Will Byers & Eleven | Jane Hopper
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-06-08
Updated: 2020-06-08
Packaged: 2021-03-04 01:15:28
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,789
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/24615145
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/gnomesb4trolls/pseuds/gnomesb4trolls
Summary: Sometimes El had nightmares, and sometimes she just had dreams.(Or: El grieving Hopper and learning what it means to have a new family)
Comments: 4
Kudos: 12





	Talking To The Lights

Sometimes El had nightmares, and sometimes she just had dreams. 

There was one dream in particular that started not very long after she moved in with the Byers, though later when she tried to remember exactly when, whether it was the first week or the second or the third, there was just a gray blur in her memory. Those first weeks felt like walking through fog: there was a thick cloud around her, and sometimes no matter what she did or how hard she tried she couldn’t see anything through it, not even the faces of the people she loved. She’d counted the days at first, but even numbers started to feel meaningless after a while. It wasn’t like those first months with Hopper, when every number meant another day away from Mike but also, maybe, another day closer to seeing him again. There was nothing waiting for her now.

In the dream, she was walking through the woods towards the cabin. It was dark, not full dark but that strange twilight that made things seem not quite real, that told you that the dark was coming but that you still had a little time, if you hurried. Usually it was snowing, and sometimes she was wearing Nancy’s tattered pink dress and the coat and hat she had stolen from the hunter, but sometimes she was in her new clothes, summer clothes, goosebumps on her bare arms as she trudged against the wind. Some things never changed, though: the lights in the cabin were always on, the windows bright squares in the distance, and she always knew that Hopper was in there, waiting for her. It never seemed to get much closer, though, no matter how she hurried, and she’d wake up with a phantom ache in her legs, in her chest, knowing that if she’d only gotten there in time she would have found him. 

After a while, after she’d been with the Byers for long enough that she no longer woke up every morning with a start, her heart crawling up her throat as she tried to remember where she was, the dream changed. 

It started out the same, but now it ended with her opening the door of the cabin and finding herself in the Byers house instead. It wasn’t the house as she knew it now, though, but the way she’d first seen it, strings of colored lights stretched across the ceiling. She stood there under the lights and wanted to cry, because she was in the wrong place and Hop was waiting for her at the cabin, the cabin that probably still had gaping holes in the roof because she didn’t know if anyone had fixed it before they left, and now he wouldn’t know where to find her. More than once she woke up crying, and she wasn’t sure if it made things better or worse to know that the dream wasn’t real, because at least in the dream she knew that he was out there somewhere. 

After they moved, on the very first night in the new house, she had the dream again. This time, though, as she stood looking up at the lights they blinked on and off, slowly, and she knew that it wasn’t the monster, and for the first time she felt like she could breathe again, though there were still tears on her face when she woke up. 

The first days at the new house were busy, and for a while she was too tired to dream. There was unpacking to do and bedrooms to set up and things to buy. Joyce took her shopping one day, just the two of them, to get her some new winter clothes and also things for her room. This house had enough bedrooms for her to have her own, and Joyce had said that she could decorate however she wanted, but she remembered her bedroom at the cabin and it felt like there was a splinter in her heart, and she couldn’t get too excited about picking out a rug or things to hang on the walls. That is, until she saw a display of Christmas lights, right as they were about to leave the store. She picked out a strand of white ones and asked if she could put them up in her room, and Joyce looked at her a little strangely, like she wanted to ask a question, but in the end she just ruffled her hair and said yes. Later, after they got home, Jonathan gave her a similar look but he helped her hang them along the top of the wall, wrapping all the way around and meeting over the doorway. Will was the only one whose face didn’t go all strange when he saw; he just smiled, and said that was a cool idea, and didn’t look at her for too long. 

She and Will didn’t always have the same bad nights, but they overlapped often enough that by the end of November they had a routine. It was nice, sometimes, to be able to just sit with someone on one of those nights, without having to explain. There were a lot of things they were still learning about each other, but he understood some things that no one else ever had, not even Mike. 

This time, Will was already up when she came out of her room. She settled next to him on the couch and he handed her a mug. 

“Hot chocolate,” he said. “I heard you moving around, so I made enough for both of us, just in case.” 

She smiled at him. “Thank you.” 

For a few minutes neither of them said anything. El listened to the clock tick, realizing that the sounds of this house had become familiar and she didn’t know when that had happened, when the particular tick of this particular clock had become a source of comfort rather than a reminder that she wasn’t where she was supposed to be. 

“You OK?” Will asked beside her. He had a book on his lap, but he hadn’t picked it back up since she’d come out here. 

She nodded, then changed her mind and shrugged. “I don’t know.” 

He waited. He was good at waiting. 

“I have this dream sometimes. I’m walking to the cabin, and the lights are on, and I know that Hopper is there, waiting. But then when I open the door, it’s your house. Your old house, I mean.” She took a breath, curled her cold hands around her mug, took a sip, swallowed. “And the lights are up, like they were when you were lost. And they blink, and I know that he’s trying to find me.” 

Will waited a little bit longer before he spoke, stillness spreading through the room. “Is that why you have the lights in your room?”

She nodded. “I know that he’s gone. But sometimes it feels like I could talk to him. Or he could talk to me.”

“That makes sense.” He stared into his own mug. “It’s weird, I don’t even remember how I did it. How I could talk to my mom through the lights, I mean. I just remember…knowing that she was there. That she was looking for me.” 

She nodded. She didn’t know why there were tears in her eyes now, why she couldn’t stop herself from crying even though she was good at that these days, better than she used to be. But it hurt that he was gone and she was here and it hurt that this felt like her house now, that the Byers felt like her family, even though she knew that it didn’t mean that he hadn’t been her family too. 

“Hey.” Will was looking at her, and she could have turned away but she didn’t, so she saw him open his arms and wait, because he knew never to touch her without checking first. She nodded, and he put his arms around her, and it didn’t feel weird or uncomfortable at all to rest her cheek on his shoulder and let the tears come. 

Eventually he moved, but only to hand her the box of Kleenex from the coffee table, and then to unfold the blanket from the back of the couch and tuck it around both of them. 

“It’s almost Thanksgiving,” he finally said, when her tears had stopped. “We’ll get to see Mike then.” 

She nodded against his shoulder. “I don’t want to be sad while he’s here.”

He pulled away a little bit so that he could look at her face. “It’s OK, though,” he said. “I mean, he’ll understand why.” 

She shrugged. She knew that he would, she knew, but there was still this thing sitting in her gut, this fear that she could lose him too. Before, when the fog had rolled back and she’d been able to see people again, she’d been so relieved that everyone was still there. That they’d waited for her. She didn’t know if she could expect anyone to wait forever, though. 

“Did I ever tell you what Mike was like, that year you were gone?” 

“No.” She raised her head to look at him, and he loosened the arm that was still around her shoulders so that she could shift position, putting just enough distance between them that she could watch his face while he talked. 

“He was a mess,” Will said. “He was basically a big jerk to everyone except me and Dustin and Lucas, and sometimes even to us. But we knew that it was because he missed you, and no one held it against him. That’s what you do, for the people you love.” 

She kept looking at him. The people you love. She took a breath, and she felt that splinter in her heart again, like the boy in the story that Hop had read to her one time, whose heart had turned to ice. There had been times when she’d wanted her heart to turn to ice, too, because then maybe it wouldn’t hurt so much. Hop had been right, though: the hurt was good. The hurt meant that even if he was gone, there were still people she loved and who loved her. It wasn’t everything she’d wanted, but it was enough. 

Something caught Will’s attention, and he glanced over the back of the couch, at the big living room window. “Look,” he said, “It’s snowing.” 

They got up and stood in front of the window together, shoulder to shoulder with the blanket still wrapped around them. The flakes swirled down through the darkness, and it felt good to be on this side of the glass, warm and safe and home.


End file.
